An AdGuard employee working their Reddit subreddit let slip that the legal order that forced them to block those domains (from their ad-blocking DNS) was a - claimed! - result of Archive.today having saved CP and refusing to delete it.
Methinks someone accidentally archived the Epstein files, and the FBI is desperately trying to scrub the unredacted backups before the archive URL becomes well-known. That alone would align somewhat with the CP claim,
Regardless of this situation I actually think that websites like Archive and TWBM should be fully transparent.
A very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them. Most of the pages that cite archived copies do so because the live version is no longer available I would like to have some assurances that archive.is and the likes are not altering their content in any way over time.
Unironically content sensitive hashing of archival pages might be one of the few use cases where something like a blockchain might actually be useful for.
You do need some kind of reliable, distributed storage though. The sequential nature of a blockchain also ensures that such stored content is held no matter what by any full node.
The hash to verify content is only half of the problem. You also need to store the _actual_ content of the page. What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?
A blockchain is, at its core, a distributed database, it is exactly made for this use case.
A quick check indicates that storing something on the Bitcoin blockchain costs about a dollar. How many millions (billions?) would Wikipedia need to spend to stash everything they reference in the blockchain?
> What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?
It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as an archive.
You both need to generate the hash at the point of archival correctly and store it in a way that cannot be modified later on.
Doing that with a blockchain like tech is one of the few use cases where the tech itself actually adds value.
Heck you might be able to store the entire pages on a blockchain or a blockchain linked storage.
The problem with these sites is that we implicitly trust them and unlike a book or other handprint media where editing or destroying all unedited existing copies is effectively impossible if a shady actor can easily start editing archived news articles and other sites that are no longer publicly available.
This is getting to blockchain for the sake of blockchain.
If Wikipedia recorded the hash of every referenced page you could verify that the archive.is page is unchanged.
You could certainly argue that archive.is isn’t the right place to store archives (I have no idea) but attempting to move all this to the blockchain would be very expensive.
You only need the hash of the original content. No blockchain is necessary. The problem is that there is no source for that hash except for the scraper that archives it since people don't put the hash in a hyperlink.
If you download an ISO for a Linux OS for example, they give you the hash of the file so you can check it. They don't build an entire blockchain whatever to validate the hash.
No, the Internet Archive is an organization that runs a web archive at archive.org while archive.is is an alternative domain for archive.today, a competing web archive run by an individual.
The .is TLD is run by ISNIC and they process registrations directly, and operating out of Iceland, it would be very strange if they took orders from the FBI.
I would bet, even when the fbi is able to track down archive.today, it will be a matter of hours until the archive is shifted to another network and reinstated.. Even though if a certain amount of archived data might be lost, the core service will be rehosted quite fast somewhere else, i would think.
>Ars inventing their own colour here. This is simply not true.
What are you talking about? Right at the top of the subpoena it literally says in bold and all caps, and I quote:
>YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFNITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.
Sounds like a notice that disclosure could result in outcomes that make the discloser liable of (the crime? of) interfering-with-an-investigation.
And thus to avoid that risk, to think twice before disclosing.
Disclosure would only be punished if the specific circumstances actually result in legally-considered-(unlawful-)interference.
The current administration would be a good joke if it wasn't real.